Ethnic, cultural, racial issues/studies

Reversing the romance: class and gender in the supermarket tabloids

Article Abstract:

Popular supermarket tabloids, such as the National Enquirer, the Star and the Globe, offer a form of resistance to stereotyped roles of feminity and class distinctions. The most popular stories in the tabloid press involve women rising over male dominance, or a satire on the rich and famous. Tabloids have a wide circulation with an audience of mainly above-40 working-class women. Tabloids generally shun politics, and only concentrate on celebrities and graphically told human interest stories. The narrative style of tabloids are colloquial and hyperbolic.

Winslow Homer's painting 'The Morning Bell' deals with the contrast between the sentimentalized New England countryside and industrial labor, reflecting a middle-class anxiety over free agency and presenting differing points of view that are unresolved. In later paintings, however, Homer naturalizes the conflict and presents it through the medium of gender. In the late painting 'Right and Left' Homer has moved toward a disembodied aesthetic point of view, repudiating the pragmatic world of action.

Gender and modernity in transnational perspective: Hugo Munsterberg and the American woman

Article Abstract:

German-Jewish intellectual Hugo Munsterberg argued against the emancipation of women in his criticisms of turn-of-the-century American culture. Munsterberg believed that feminism was detrimental to the nation and the race. In this way, he advocated modern ideals such as importance of science and technology, but at the same time believed that modernity could only be attained by keeping the forces of feminism in check.